I understand what public / protected / private accessors mean in Java or PHP. However, when you decide whether to make a private method?
Imagine that I have a class that processes configuration lines — they must match a particular regular expression, and if so, further logic is executed to make sure the lines are valid.
This code is currently used in a private method in the configuration class. This class accepts configuration lines and then returns values to the client code after checking the lines.
However, I want unit test verification code, so maybe it should be in another class. I usually do not do this, although I know that the code will be reused. If it will be used by only one class, as in this case, I usually just make it private.
So my question is: what design rules should inform a programmer that a particular method should be private compared to being moved to its own class?
simon source
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